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What is the global catalog and how you can view all the gc server in your whole ad forest ?

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Question added by Syed Asgar Mahmood Zaidi , Senior System Engineer , Royal Hospital
Date Posted: 2013/10/09
Mohammad Ibrahim
by Mohammad Ibrahim , System Administrator , FURSAN TRAVEL & TOURISM CO

A Global Catalog is domain controller that store a copy of all the active directory object in a forest .The global catalog store a full copy of all object in the directory  for its host domain and a partical copy of all object for all other domains in the forest. 

its help to finding object  and enable user searchs for directory information througout all domain in a forest.

Supplies user principal name authentication-it resloved user UPN when the authentication domain controller does not have knoledge of the account.

 

 

 

We can view all the gc server in the forest for this way

repadmin/showreps

domain_controller

OR

You can use Replmon.exe for the same purpose.

OR

AD Sites and Services and nslookup gc._msdcs.%USERDNSDOMAIN%

Ahmad Abualkishk
by Ahmad Abualkishk , SENIOR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR AND TEAM LEADER , Bank Of Jordan

global catalog is a domain controller that has it is own domain active directory database and a subset of the active directory database of all domains in the forest 

 you can check or set the golbal catalog from active directory sites and services tool 

Ahmed Elhamamy
by Ahmed Elhamamy , Head of Service Delivery and Operations , Nournet

A global catalog is a domain controller that stores a copy of all Active Directory objects in a forest, it stores a full copy of all objects in the directory for its host domain and a partial copy of all objects for all other domains in the forest.Global catalog is created automatically on the initial domain controller in the forest, each forest should have at leat1 GC, while in an envoroment all DCs can be GCs, the first domain controller that is installed for a given forest is automatically selected to be a GC server. Because the global catalog is the forestwide location of the membership of all universal groups, access to a global catalog server is a requirement for authentication in a multidomain forest.

During user's authentication, the domain controller that is authenticating the user's logon request needs to locate a GC in order to construct the universal groups to which that user belongs. In the event that there is only one domain in the forest, all domain controllers contain the same data, so there is no need to locate a GC. If the domain controller handling the user logon request is also a GC, there is no need to remote the request to another GC. There is no requirement that the GC selected to service the request be a member of the domain to which the authenticating domain controller belongs

Exchange servers only communicate with GC server.

Global catalog can be enabled or removed from the Active direcotry sites and servies console.

1) Active directory sites and services.

2) Active directory replication monitor.

3) Telnet port389.

4) GC records in DNS server.

5) dsquery.

6) Powershell query.

Muhammad Anzar
by Muhammad Anzar , DevOps/DevSecOps Architect , Confidential

Global catalog is conataining all the meta data or database representation from Active Directory domain service.

 

For searching all Global catalog server, use following command

dsquery server -isgc

 

Mohd Aslam
by Mohd Aslam , System Administrator QA – windows hyper-v and vmware , Open Solutions Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

The global catalog provides the ability to locate objects from any domain without having to know the domain name. A global catalog server is a domain controller that, in addition to its full, writable domain directory partition replica, also stores a partial, read-only replica of all other domain directory partitions in the forest. 

 

you can see all GC in forest using dsquery 

 

Adeel Ilyas Hinjrah
by Adeel Ilyas Hinjrah , Sr. Infrastructure Engineer , Malomatia

Global catalog is a readonly subset of active directory objects with limited attributes used by some applications/services like Microsoft Exchange Server. To find out global catalog server we have multiples ways,

 

1) Active directory sites and services.

2) Active directory replication monitor.

3) Telnet port389.

4) GC records in DNS server.

5) dsquery.

6) Powershell query.

Tajudeen Kalifullah
by Tajudeen Kalifullah , IT Support Executive , International Information Technology Company

Global catalog is Central repositary of object in a forest and it provides master searchable database that contains every object in evry domain in forest

It enables users to logon to the network

Suneesh C S
by Suneesh C S , IT Support Engineer , G4S Secure Solutions

Global catlog server is basically maintains a list or subset of various information from all the various domains in the forest.

redpadmin /showreps  command will display the Globel catlog server

 

The proper method is nslookup gc._msdcs.(YourForestDomain)

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